--- title: "Context management" date: "2026-04" category: "Working with AI" tags: ["Working with AI"] description: "Use progressive disclosure to make the entry document a table of contents, then keep building layered indexes so it gets revealed a piece at a time..." source: "https://enriquemark.com/en/posts/%E4%B8%8A%E4%B8%8B%E6%96%87%E7%AE%A1%E7%90%86" --- Use progressive disclosure to make the entry document a table of contents, then keep building layered indexes so it gets revealed a piece at a time. As [OpenAI](https://openai.com/zh-Hans-CN/index/harness-engineering/) says in this article, AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md should be a map, not a comprehensive manual. The context window is only part of it. What matters is attention. Context that runs too long only rots and scatters attention, and ends up less effective than a finely scoped one. --- We tried the "one large [`AGENTS.md`⁠(opens in a new window)](https://agents.md/)" approach. Predictably, it failed: - **Context is a scarce resource.** A huge instruction file crowds out the task, the code and the relevant docs, so the agent either misses the critical constraints or starts optimizing for the wrong ones. - **Too much guidance stops working.** When everything is "important", nothing is. The agent ends up pattern matching locally instead of navigating deliberately. - **It rots immediately.** A sprawling manual turns into a graveyard of stale rules. The agent can't tell what still holds, and once humans stop maintaining it, the file quietly becomes an attractive source of trouble. - **It's hard to verify.** A single blob doesn't suit mechanical checks (coverage, freshness, ownership, cross-links), so drift is unavoidable. --- Funny to say, but the old line holds: having all of it equals having none of it. Building a portable docs/ is the right way to go, the same constraint as SKLIIS.md, where the entry file shouldn't run past five hundred lines and can be shorter still. --- **Translation note.** I wrote this in Chinese. This English version is an LLM translation, so the wording is not mine even though the thinking is. Original: [上下文管理]().